Chapter Five

II

Always it lingered, the silent song for the dead.

The morgue lights hummed slightly, mingling with the sounds of refrigeration units in a hushed requiem for all those whose lullaby was forever. Even with the sounds, there was always a feeling of silence. Eerie silence, as if the dead themselves were hushing, demanding a rest in peace.

Albert Robbins was used to the feeling of the morgue and found it almost peaceful. Where the dead dwelled, the rage of life seemed all the more precious. For all the gruesome scars of life he saw here, there was still peace. The dead suffered no more. The living limped on with their scars and echoes of pain and prosthetics every day.

He hadn't imagined this the place he would be working when he was young and brash and full of ideas of saving lives and doctor's heroism. He had stumbled into it and found his feet. For the dead deserved their dignity and the living the answers he could sometimes provide. And thus he had come to find he liked the work, for all its silence and crimes uncovered.

And always, he came home to life he felt all the more privileged to have when working with death every day.

"Hey, Doc," a light voice called from the door, and Catherine slipped in, hair almost white under the harsh lights, a subdued look on her face. She wasn't happy with her current case, he could tell already.

"Catherine," he greeted her with. "Without your younger colleagues today?"

She gave a smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. "Seems so. What do you have on our murdered girl?"

She followed him as he pulled Georgina James out of her cool temporary grave, pale and dead on her bed of steel. He'd shaved the hair partly off, showing the bullet's ripping journey through her head. It robbed her of some of her beauty, but violent death was pretty only to those lost in it.

But flesh was flesh and he could look upon it coolly, but always, he still felt a moment of stillness before he did. It was flesh that had once lived. He hoped he never forgot.

"Bullet fragmented upon entry," he explained, touching the skin through his latex glove. Catherine leaned forward, looking intently. "I've sent the fragments I found to trace, you should check with them. Now, the entry wound... Notice the stippling?"

"Unburned gunpowder. She was shot up close and personal," Catherine remarked, voice so even he could feel the emotion locked in. For all the CSIs tried, they could never quite be beyond human.

Neither could he, he reflected and felt the winter of death touch even through his gloves.

"Yes," he replied, continuing his trek of the body's particular. "She had some light bruising on the knee, but the colour indicates it happened days before. A light fall or a simple bump into a chair, perhaps. Her wrist bone has a healed fracture, years old most likely. Generally, she was in good health when she died."

"Sexual abuse?"

He shook his head, for once glad to answer in the negative. "Nothing I could see."

"Hmmm," Catherine said distantly mind already on possibilities, theories, theses. "Anything else?"

"I found Valium in her system," he replied, straightening and feeling his back protest and reminding him he was old, "not a lethal dose, but enough to knock her out. She had it close to death, it's only been partially digested."

"Explaining no defensive wounds," she said, looking thoughtful as she let her gaze travel across Georgina's features, a caress of sorts. "Maybe she knew her attacker. Maybe she just had an offered glass of juice and never got to fight back."

"You're the ones who make sense of it all," he replied, pushing Georgina back to her silence and cold and sleep. Until it was time for another grave of silence, one that would claim her flesh.

"Sometimes there's no sense," Catherine commented and grief passed over her face like a shadow, darkening her face. He knew her well enough not to say nothing, letting her vulnerable moment pass silently. He had seen CSIs come and go and pass into shadow. When too many expressions as those crossed their faces, he worried and waited and all too often the burn-out came and another took their place. And another.

'Humans are all too human,' he thought and watched her regain her calm.

"Thanks Doc," she said steadily. He tilted his head and watched her purposely walk out, being greeted by Warrick in the bright hallway. Al could not see what they said to each other, but he could see how brightness became her more than the morgue shade and how she leaned against Warrick for just a moment, as if taking solace in the younger man's nearness.

'The temptations that rests in one who understands,' Al thought and remembered dark eyes smiling at a younger him; knowing him, loving him, understanding him. His wife. Still understanding. Still knowing. Still temptation.

Catherine and Warrick walked away into light and life, and Robbins returned to his silent work. There was never a shortage of bodies to work on. Not all were murders. Sometimes, humans died on their own, bodies giving up, accidents happening, diseases striking. But the years in his work had taught him never to take anything for granted. Each body had a story to tell and sometimes, just sometimes, it was one of a wrong committed.

Every sometimes was one time too often and that thought paved the way to burnout and exhaustion. Easier to focus merely on the biology and let bodies be flesh and the years pass, the dead changing and remaining the same. Easier to grow older when the dead haunted less.

He had long since felt old age crawl up on him. He knew the body, he knew the signs. When he had been young, the years had seemed like eternity, but life taught you all too soon how treacherously fast the years passed. Easy to lose your life somewhere in between.

Unless you had someone to ground you to the moments, kissing you to morning with the taste of coffee on her lips.

'Jennifer,' he thought and smiled, feeling the lingering taste of coffee on his lips still.

He was finishing his notes on Anna Caroline Jensen when he became aware of Grissom's presence, though he hadn't heard the CSI enter. Sometimes, no one could walk in silence like Grissom, wearing the quiet like a shadow.

"Notes on our victim?" Grissom asked, though it was more a statement than a question.

"The family have requested her body to be returned to Norway. I'm just finishing things on my end."

Grissom nodded, folding his arms and looking unusually thoughtful and almost distant. Robbins wondered if he had come to the morgue to talk or just get away from all the sounds. Of all the CSIs, Grissom merged with the morgue the easiest and at times seemed almost more comfortable in the shades of the morgue than engaged in the world outside.

"I hear you're heading that way yourself."

"Who told you?"

"Young Mr. Sanders."

"Ah," Grissom replied, smiling slightly. "Young Mr. Sanders could be right."

"Something bothering about this case, Grissom?"

"Yes."

Robbins didn't ask for an elaboration. Grissom told what he wanted when he wanted and answered questions with riddles. Easier to let the man pace out his thoughts himself and reveal something every decade or so.

"Why on the plane?" Grissom asked the silence and the dead, eyes in shadow. "The killer could have risked her realising something was wrong and get medical help. Why give her an overdose as she was about to cross an ocean?"

"Assuming it was a murder and assuming the killer knew she was coming here," Robbins pointed out. "Lithium carbonate is an unreliable drug if the intension is to kill. There are better choices. Maybe she did it herself."

"I don't know," Grissom said slowly, shaking his head. "There's no sign of intension of suicide. Why did she leave her country if she wanted to kill herself? And where'd she get the drug? Her doctor in Norway faxed over her medical records. No prescribed lithium carbonate."

"Accident? Mixed-up medicines?"

"No. It doesn't feel right."

"Feel right, Grissom?" Robbins asked, giving him a penetrating glance. "What does the evidence tell you?"

"That I should go to Norway," Grissom replied after a heartbeat, straightening. "Shall I bring you anything?"

"Norwegian coffee?"

"Anything for you, Doc," Grissom gave a slight wink and disappeared as quietly as he had come, leaving Robbins to wonder. Grissom seemed as surely a part of the lab as the walls themselves, as the bodies of the morgue, but at the same time he was never quite there. Like a thought, present but not substantial. Only sometimes, in the gentleness of his eyes as he looked at Sara, did Grissom sometimes seem to take stronger shape.

Temptation.

To seek life when death bordered the days. Few could resist. Grissom had. So far, at least.

'There's always a so far to every part of life. Until you give in,' Al thought and let the silence of the morgue hum to him as he finished his notes, categorising the dead, detecting the wrongs, resting the dead.

Always it lingered, the silent song for the dead. But eventually, he left it to hum and went home to his wife and life's temptation.